Given the calls from Esquerra Republicana for “responsibility” and yesterday’s request from President Pere Aragonès for the Aminstía law to be approved in the Congress of Deputies as soon as possible, this week, Junts reply to the Republicans that “no “It is time to hurry, but to have a good law.”
The spokesperson and vice president of the party, Josep Rius, assured this Monday at the press conference after the meeting of the JxCat party leadership that he continues to “negotiate with the PSOE as always” and has referred once again to the “discretion ” that the party has had on its lips in recent months to avoid commenting on the extension requested by the socialists in the Lower House to extend the processing of the norm for another 15 days.
“We signed an investiture agreement and said that the legislature would advance depending on whether the agreements were met,” Rius simply stated. “An extension has been requested to continue negotiating and we will do so, with discretion and rigor,” he concluded.
Likewise, the post-convergent spokesperson has pointed out that the Galician elections that were held yesterday, in which the PSOE-PSdeG was the biggest victim by losing five seats, “do not change the scenario” of the amnesty negotiation.
Esquerra already showed signs of concern last week. Several of its cadres came out in public after the disagreement in the meetings between the PSOE and Junts in Barcelona over the Amnesty law to urge them to close the negotiations. The failure of the PSdeG in the Galician elections has increased this fear. The Republican spokesperson Raquel Sans assured this Monday that the results in Galicia did not influence the socialist ranks with respect to penal oblivion and recalled that the BNG, which voted on January 30 in favor of the norm, has grown in votes and seats, but he immediately hinted that “the more time passes, the more risks the law runs.”
The PSOE and Junts will most likely ask for an extension tomorrow to discuss the law again in the Congressional Justice Commission. So along with this request for speed, Sans has appealed for responsibility. The Esquerra spokesperson has called on the two groups to “not delay any longer” the amnesty and has reiterated that the law must be approved as soon as possible so that it is applied as soon as possible. “There are no magical possibilities,” Sans has warned, for the text to be more “robust” than what, in her opinion, it is now, with the current draft rejected in the plenary session of Congress.
Sans has not clarified why the extension in time endangers the amnesty or what tweaks would negatively affect independence interests. He has justified that they will not expose in public the issues that could weaken the law to avoid any signal or clue to subsequent judicial actions.
Esquerra is also forceful when it comes to maintaining that one thing is the negotiation of the amnesty and another is that of the budgets of the Generalitat. However, the Catalan accounts are still not approved by the Government, waiting to obtain the necessary support so that they can later be endorsed by the Parliament. The PSC and the commons are the two assets that the Executive of Pere Aragonès has the most. But the delay with the Amnesty law also conditions the calendar of the Catalan numbers, and on the rebound, those of Pedro Sánchez. In the PSOE it is not so clear today that the post-convergents agree to support them.
However, for Sans the negotiation for the Catalan budgets and the amnesty “are completely independent.” “Every day that passes is time that the repression, the PP, Vox, the judges win,” he stressed in relation to the amnesty. “We must stop being partisan and playing with resources that do not belong to ERC,” he later added on the other side of the balance. Of course, in January the spokesperson acknowledged in an interview that the accounts of the Generalitat and those of Moncloa are linked.
